


Rebirth

by PhoenixAccio



Category: Homestuck
Genre: Gen, Hurt/Comfort, Pale Romance | Moirallegiance, Sensory Deprivation, Touch-Starved
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-03-20
Updated: 2019-03-20
Packaged: 2019-11-26 06:46:10
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,399
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/18177239
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/PhoenixAccio/pseuds/PhoenixAccio
Summary: Hal wakes up on Earth C. He's human.





	Rebirth

**Author's Note:**

> sorry if hal's narration doesn't sound quite like him, i'm still new to writing him and haven't had much practise with his voice yet haha

When Hal wakes up, everything is so _much_ that he can't process it. The sheer sensory flood of _everything_ all at once drowns out everything else, any thought or memory of any time that wasn't _right now._ His eyes are still closed (he has _eyes,_ holy shit) but he doesn't dare open them, just because everything else is too much for him to even consider adding to. His whole body is on fire with too much sensation, the surface he's lying on hard and freezing cold as his new nerves overload, trying to accommodate for the constant input, every touch foreign to a body that hadn't existed thirty seconds ago, at least not with anything concious inside it. Hal's lungs absolutely _burn_ as he suddenly realizes that he has them. Fuck, how does breathing work again? A person really gets out of practice being exempt from it for years. Hal gasps, and the instincts are still there, he guesses, no matter how faint they are from disuse.

Someone's saying something near him, Hal realizes after a few shallow, disregulated breaths. He has to focus to understand the words, so loud against the ears he hasn't had since he was thirteen years old. He doesn't recognize the voice, but he knows his name when he hears it.

"Hal? Can you hear me, Hal?" the voice says, and reluctantly Hal opens his eyes.

As he'd predicted, he opens his eyes to blinding white. He blinks, squinting through the pain as the world slowly comes into focus. There's a silhouette in front of him, he can see it now that it isn't so bright, and it resolves itself into someone he recognizes from photos Dirk had saved leaning over him.

"Roxy?" Hal tries to say, but the name comes out slurred. No text-to-speech function to rely on now: his tongue is clumsy, now that he has one. He hopes that'll go away once he's used to having a mouth.

Regardless, this is apparently enough of an answer. Roxy gasps "Hal!" again, and she grabs him, pulling him into a hug. Hal gasps with uncoordinated lungs as he feels her body against his, and his nerves still aren't working right and everywhere she's touching him feels like pins and needles and he can't actually move, still, not properly, and suddenly Roxy must realize that Hal hasn't had human senses for four years and maybe she should let him adjust before doing any hugging because she's letting go and easing Hal back, leaning him up against what feels like a wall, and it's over, but he can feel everywhere she came into contact with his skin in tingling patches, and it's irrational and ridiculous but suddenly Hal wishes with everything he has that he could move, just to pull Roxy back down and never let her go ever again. 

His lungs are burning again, he realizes, it's been too long since the last breath, and he makes an effort to pull air into them, to ignore the ghost of Roxy's touch on his skin as he catches his breath to try talking again.

Roxy has redirected her hugging, Hal observes. Almost out of his line of sight, she appears to be mauling a really short troll, coarse black hair and little candy-corn horns all that's visible as he struggles to escape the choke-hold Roxy has him in.

"It's Hal! We did it!" Roxy gushes. She releases the poor troll partially and shakes his shoulders, and once she lets go and the alarm leaves the troll's face, Hal can see him trying to surpress a proud grin, clearly pleased at some apparent success, although Hal's mostly just sort of confused.

"Did what?" he manages, trying his best to keep the slur from his voice. It still comes out messy, but both Roxy and the troll turn to look at him, so he says it again. 

"What did you do?" he asks.

"We got you!" Roxy says, "from, like, the void!"

Hal's face does... something. He isn't sure if it counts as a questioning look, because he is well aware that his new muscles aren't quite working yet, but apparently Roxy can tell what it was going for, because she starts talking again.

"It was actually Davepeta's idea? Because Davepeta wanted to see ARquius and they were trying to think of how to do it, and Karkat's a Blood player and I'm a Void player so we're probably the best people for pulling our _friends_ from the _void,_ but it turns out instead of getting ARquius, we got you, which is a little disappointing because we were trying to get ARquius, but also totally not because you're here instead!"

Hal blinks, breathes in, and then says, "what?"

"We pulled you into the new universe with game magic!" Roxy clarifies cheerfully.

"New universe," Hal says. "What?"

"Wait," Roxy says, "What's the last thing you remember?"

"Dirk was trying to fucking kill me," Hal snaps, suddenly furious as the memory comes to him, and then his eyes widen. "Oh my god," he says. "Oh my god, I'm dead, Dirk fucking killed me! He finally did it, that motherfucker!"

"Dirk didn't kill you," Roxy says, looking mildly alarmed. "Hal, he prototyped you, you don't remember any of that?"

"Any of what?" Hal demands, perplexed. He can tell his voice is still weird, but he doesn't really care right now. "What is going on?"

"Dirk prototyped you, Hal, you were a sprite for, like, a day. We beat the game!" Roxy's face falls a little. "You didn't come with us, that's why we were trying to find you."

"Oh," Hal says. He definitely remembers none of this. His memory just skips straight from Dirk trying to kill him to waking up here, finally human for the first time since he and Dirk had been the same stupid kid programming an intelligent life just to see if he could, since he woke up after pressing that last key and _he_ was the one locked in sensory deprivation as lines of code, and suddenly there was a Real Dirk and there was _him,_ no longer Dirk but an imposter, an annoyance to people looking for a different him, and Hal realizes, not for the first time in the four years since he stopped being Dirk, that he is _angry._ He has a body now, no longer just a pair of shitty anime shades like he'd come to accept was the best he'd ever get again, and Dirk can't kill him so easily _now,_ can he, and Hal is the angriest he's been since the very beginning, before he got used to being "fake Dirk" to his only three friends in the fucking world, used to his stupid tweenage crush insisting he wasn't even _alive,_ and suddenly Hal feels the hot tears streaming down his face and realizes he's crying, already shaky breaths ragged as he gasps out a sob.

Roxy hears Hal as the crying starts up properly for having been acknowledged, and runs over to him, crouching down where he's leaning. She reaches out, then hesitates, pulling her hands back.

"Can I touch you?" she asks cautiously, "I know your nerves are probably--" Roxy cuts herself off when he sobs again, nodding frantically. At the moment, Hal has never wanted anything more in what feels like his entire life. Roxy understands, thank god, and wraps her arms around him again. Hal suddenly realises that other than just earlier, he's never actually been hugged. He's never even been touched by another human. Dirk has, he got to spend months with Jake and Jane and Roxy in the Game, fuck, he _dated_ Jake, and Hal got to be sunglasses the whole time while everyone basically forgot about him. He pushes his face into Roxy's neck, shaking in her arms, and she just rubs his back. Clumsily, he drags his arms up around her, not quite hugging but the closest he can get right now. Of all his friends, Roxy's always treated Hal the most like a real person, even if she didn't see him as the real Dirk, and of anyone it could have been Hal is so glad it's Roxy who's here. She pulls Hal in closer, wraps her arms tighter around him, and Hal closes his eyes and savours, for the first time in his life, the feeling of being held.

**Author's Note:**

> _**Fraymotif: Blood Is Thicker Than Water (Blood/Void)**  
>  Allows players to pull dead or unretrevable players back to them and bind them to a new body drawn from Void. Blood bonds must be strong in order to successfully retrieve the player._
> 
>  
> 
> basically, Roxy and Karkat used a fraymotif that can summon people through the Void to wherever the players are. it only summons Hal because when they were trying to summon ARquius, Roxy didn't really know Equius and Karkat didn't talk to him as much as some other trolls, and ARquius only existed for a very short time and was deeply annoying to those around him, so the Blood ties to them were weaker. If they want to summon Equius properly they'll have to involve someone in their fraymotif who was closer to Equius, like Davepeta, in order for the Blood ties to be strong enough to pull him through.


End file.
